Comparison of Pulmonary MR-Angiography and Ultrashort Echo Time MRI with Gadolinium and Ferumoxytol for the Depiction of the Pulmonary Vasculature

Comparison of Pulmonary MR-Angiography and Ultrashort Echo Time MRI with Gadolinium and Ferumoxytol for the Depiction of the Pulmonary Vasculature

March 2017 to October 2017

Pulmonary MRA is an emerging technique to detect pulmonary embolism without the use of ionizing radiation. This technique is capable of achieving high quality angiograms in approximately 75% of the cases. However, a subset of patients fails the breathholding required for pulmonary MRA. To overcome this limitation, free-breathing ultrashort echo time (UTE) imaging of the pulmonary vasculature has been introduced recently. Due to the longer scan time of the free breathing UTE sequence, a blood pool contrast agent is beneficial in order to achieve constant high intravascular signal throughout the scan.

Ferumoxytol is a contrast agent that is increasingly used due to its excellent magnetic properties and the lack of gadolinium. Ferumoxytol is an effective blood pool contrast agent with an intravascular half-life of 14-15 hours.

The purpose of this study is to compare pulmonary MRA and UTE imaging with gadobenate dimeglumine and ferumoxytol in order to evaluate if a comparable image quality can be achieved with ferumoxytol.